Nicholas Marlowe

Nick studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art and History at Cambridge University. After working for thirty years in the book trade he is now a freelance writer and artist. His interests include breadmaking, touring historic battlefields, and trying to get above D4 on the flute (maybe it's time for the piccolo). He lives in Teddington, England.

Art & ArchitectureMarch 11, 2017London,
The big draw in the Royal Academy's new show on American painting during the 1930s is the iconic painting "American Gothic" by Grant Wood. The stern-looking father and daughter pair - actually posed by Wood's sister Nan and his dentist, ...

Art & ArchitectureOctober 31, 2016London,
How serious were the British about Modern art? When the first Post-Impressionist exhibition arrived in London in 1910, students at the Slade School of Art were banned from attending, for fear it would corrupt them, although ...

Art & ArchitectureOctober 11, 2016London,
Revolutionary though the art of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) may have been, at its core was the human figure, and portraiture was always an important part of his output. In association with the Museu Picasso Barcelona, the ...

MusicOctober 9, 2016London,
After a rollercoaster year of budget cuts and high-profile walkouts, English National Opera's 2016-17 season opens with this much-heralded new "Don Giovanni" from fêted director Richard Jones.
Oddly enough, given Jones's 25-year association with the company, this is ...

Art & ArchitectureSeptember 27, 2016London,
Website
September 24, 2016-January 2, 2017
Main Galleries, Burlington House
There have been quite a few exhibitions in the U.K. on individual Abstract Expressionists - notably the big Rothko show at Tate Britain a few years ago; ...

Art & ArchitectureJune 25, 2016London,
The inspiration for this show was the National Gallery’s acquisition of a painting by Camille Corot, “the Italian Woman”, from the estate of Lucian Freud after the artist’s death in 2011. It turns out that over 70 works ...

Art & ArchitectureMay 14, 2016London,
Pride of place in the first room of this exhibition goes to a vast and very odd painting, "The Disruption Portrait", by the 19th-century artist David Octavius Hill. Twenty-three years in the making, it depicts the ...

Art & ArchitectureApril 16, 2016London,
In 1974 Michael Craig-Martin exhibited an ordinary glass of water on a shelf, the type you normally find in bathrooms, and called it "An Oak Tree." That’s what it was, because that's what he said it ...

Art & ArchitectureMarch 3, 2016London,
Peter Ustinov once said that if Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510) were alive today, he'd be working for "Vogue." You can see what he was driving at. Around 1485, Botticelli painted "The Birth of Venus," which famously shows the goddess ...

Art & ArchitectureFebruary 25, 2016London,
You get a good idea of the esteem in which Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) was held by later French painters from a small Cézanne, fittingly titled "The Apotheosis of Delacroix." It shows the older artist being borne heavenward by angels, one ...